25/03/2013 Part One. VII International Congress of the Film Language Latin American Systemic Functional Linguistic Association "FROM GENRE TO CLAUSE: SFL CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE 1. From ‘the silents’ to Seinfeld STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY" 2. Brief Encounter Film Language and Audio 3. Ken Loach Description: two genres in one. 4. A challenge Christopher Taylor University of Trieste Hypothesis: the existence of ‘filmese’ Silent movies • Film language is a genre in itself, in that the • From the days of the Magic Lantern, silent language written in film scripts and then films needed verbal assistance of some kind, performed by actors differs from everyday and this was provided (partly) by dialogue. • (Taylor, 1999, Pavesi, 2005, Quaglio, 2009, INTERTITLES Forchini, 2010) The graphics of intertitles Intertitles • Forerunners of subtitles (on cardboard • Multimodal texts within multimodal texts placards), used for example in • Written language integrated with film in terms Uncle Tom’s Cabin of layout and verbal and non-verbal content. No emotive or dramatic effects (no appraisal) Eliza pleads with Uncle Tom to go away 1 25/03/2013 … and then along came talkies • Film is a complex semiotic event • In everyday conversation, much language use is in fact formulaic in nature, and much ordinary talk is humdrum and banal, whereas the time and space constraints of films, and the need to relate interesting, exciting or engaging stories, leads to an excess of highly pertinent, dramatic or intriguing exchanges. Ordinary spoken language phatic devices discourse markers fillers interjections hesitations false starts etc. Brief Encounter Brief Encounter 2 • Brief Encounter (1946) is director David Lean's • The screenplay was adapted and based on brilliantly-crafted, classic British masterpiece. playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act It is one of the greatest romantic tearjerkers of (half-hour) stage play Still Life. all time, with a very downbeat ending. The • The film still maintains chaste minimalism. romantic couple includes a wife/mother (stage actress Celia Johnson) looking for escape from her humdrum life and sterile marriage, and a dashing doctor (Trevor Howard in his third film). 2 25/03/2013 Brief Encounter 6 Maconie 2 Stuart Maconie • “Two nice middle-class people, married but • Perhaps the greatest British film ever made. not to each other, have an unconsummated love affair after a chance meeting at a railway station. She gets cold feet and he goes off to South Africa.” Video Brief Encounter Brief Encounter 3 • Laura (speaking about Dolly to herself): I wish I could trust you. I wish you were a wise, kind friend, instead of a gossiping acquaintance I've known casually for years and never particularly cared for. I wish, I wish... Dolly: Fancy him going all the way to Africa. Is he married? Laura: Oh yes. Dolly: Any children? Laura: Yes. Two boys. He's very proud of them. Dolly: Is he taking them with him, his wife and children I mean? Laura: Yes, yes he is. Dolly: Well I suppose it's sensible in a way, rushing off to start anew in the wide open spaces and all that sort of thing. But, ha, ha, wild horses wouldn't drag me away from England and home and all the things I'm used to. I mean, one has one's roots after all, hasn't one? Laura: Oh yes, one has one's roots. Laura John Sessions • “I stood there trembling right on the edge, but • Only the most cold-hearted, Ray-ban wearing, I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I should like Face reading, post-modern cynic could to be able to say that it was the thought of possibly not be moved by her. you and the children that prevented me but it wasn’t. I had no thoughts at all, only an overwhelming desire not to feel anything ever again. Not to be unhappy anymore…” 3 25/03/2013 Celia Johnson Filmese – The Rope (Hitchcock) • ‘going up north for four weeks’ location at A Well, come on, we don’t have too much time. some horrible railway station’ Mrs. Wilson will be comng back soon. B I didn’t forget. I have her key. I told her I have lost mine. How are you going to explain this’ A I am not. (polished and rehearsed) Video Seinfeld Seinfeld - ‘The Revenge’ • LEVITAN: Remind me to tell you what we did in Lake George. Get this … I got it all on video. (laughing) • GEORGE: That’s it. This is it. I’m done. Through. It’s over. I’m gone. Finished. Over. I will never work for you again. Look at you. You think you’re an important man. Is that what you think? You are a laughing stock. You are a joke. These people are laughing at you. You’re nothing! You have no brains, no ability, nothing!. I quit! Film language How is a film text read? Return to hypothesis: • Films can be read at three levels (Monaco, 2009) • The ‘context of situation’ of a film is an ‘artificially produced situation’ (APS) and does not totally reflect • Physiological a real situation, however much a director strives for • Mental that effect. • Psychological • It is “written to be spoken as if not written” • It is ‘filmese’. 4 25/03/2013 Physiological Santiago Araújo • Efficient and extensive saccadic patterns • “the positive influence of subtitling in • Follow camera movement, etc, as director wished. language teaching is not unanimously • How viewers view dynamic scenes upheld”… • … “the contribution of subtitled film to foreign language teaching has not been sufficiently tested.” • Certainly not in terms of CLIL – my next job. AD: cosa audio-descrivere? AD: cosa audio-descrivere? Tempi di lettura e rilettura Mental • Needs experience and knowledge to understand cultural and visual conventions. 5 25/03/2013 Kramer versus Kramer Psychological • Integrate all sets of meaning (physiological, • We didn’t have the Mets, but we had the Brooklyn mental, cultural,…). Dodgers, we had Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. • Films are understood through a multiple semiotic barrage. • Non avevamo i motorini, ma avevamo i monopattini, le pistole a schizzo e non a laser. • Equivalent effect The Loach Style The Loach Style 4 essential extra-linguistic information from the dialogues based on spontaneous visual – through the use of ‘symbols’; conversation; e.g., bleak council estates, conditions of poverty, poor clothing, etc. in casual talk speakers effect a semantic activity, a continuous process of construction and negotiation of meaning… characters thus interact in habitual and informal contexts and discuss everyday … but they do it subconsciously. matters: work, family, friendship, etc. Eggins and Slade (1997) Amateur actors The paradox (of casual conversation) lies in Since his early experience in television Loach has tried to use amateur or semi-professional actors because the fact that casual conversation is the type of “they don’t think technically and give themselves talk in which we feel most relaxed, most completely to the film without questioning.” spontaneous and most ourselves, and yet They are often actually unemployed people, women casual conversation is a critical site for the whose children have been taken into care, ex social structure of reality. alcoholics, etc. who are allowed to create dialogue around the script, in the search for the “right balance between scripted dialogue and life” Acting means REacting 6 25/03/2013 Amateur actors 3 But all this begs the questions… Loach’s dialogues are consequently rich in colourful expressions, proverbial usage, colloquialisms and language variety in the IS IT REALLY REAL? form of dialectal expressions and regional accents. “If yer a worker it rains stones seven days a week” experiment Loach vs. Cobuild Discourse Cobuild corpus Loach films The use of the following discourse markers in markers Loach films (My name is Joe, Raining Well 246 220 Stones, The Navigators) and in the Cobuild But 366 230 corpus was subjected to comparison. So 342 210 Now 120 80 Well, but, so, now, then, You know, I mean Then 162 105 You know 264 240 I mean 192 170 Loach vs Cobuild Insert video Raining Stones 400 350 300 well 250 but so 200 now 150 then 100 you know 50 I mean 0 Cobuld loach 7 25/03/2013 Raining Stones - script Raining Stones - transcription Anne - What’s up? What’s up? Bob - Nothin. Nuthin. Anne - Then what you snappin’ for? What yer snappin’ at me fo? …… …… Anne - I told you last night it’d be summat liike that. I told yer last nigh it was gonna be summat li tha. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? What is wrong with you? Bob - I’ve had the van nicked. I’ve had the van nicked. Language varieties Language varieties 2 Dialect Dialect Sociolect Sociolect gradual Film language script Film language transcription dilution Dubbing Translated film language (dubbing/subtitling) Subtitling Language varieties 3 Language varieties 4 Dialect Dialect Sociolect Sociolect specific localisation Film language to Film language foreignisation generic neutralisation Dubbing Dubbing Subtitling Subtitling 8 25/03/2013 BUT Forchini 2010 A challenge – The America Movie Corpus – The Longman Spoken American Corpus Study of ‘real movie data’, i.e. transcriptions of films not scripts. – applying Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis Forchini ‘you know’ • “… both face-to-face and movie conversation • The expression ‘you know’ appears in both are informal, non-narrative, situation- domains though occurences are higher in the dependent and not highly persuasive. spoken corpus (0.35%) than in the movie corpus Consequently, since these are all factors linked (0.15%). But it has extremely similar patterning. to the spontaneous nature of conversation (cf. • More interestingly, ‘you now’ is the most Biber, 1998), it can then be concluded that frequent 2-gram in both domains.